Visual Design Intensive Week.

I mentioned in the previous post about the intensive, week long workshops that we had. This blog post will cover everything that I done during the Visual Design week and a couple of extra things that are related to it. The entire week was really a crash-course in the whole design process, something that we'd look at more in-depth later on in the course, so this was something to sink our teeth into. The entire week was really a huge learning experience for me and was much harder than I was expecting it to be.

Silhouettes into Vehicles

To kick things off we had to grab a book containing images that we liked and some sort of an object, I chose James Gurney's Color and Light and a desk tidy wheelie bin, we then had to create silhouettes from both the book and the bin.

Using these silhouettes we then had to design some sort of vehicle. It then hit me that a wheelie bin was a difficult choice, it's mostly square, the only 2 interesting features are the lid and wheels and I'm using the word interesting lightly here. I spent a large amount of time just staring at the bin and my silhouettes and the only thing I could see was the bin, eventually I reach my boredom limit and grabbed a pen and some paper,then I began tracing/scribbling over some of the silhouettes to try and get something rolling.

Once I put pen to paper ideas began to flow, the frustration vanished and I really began to have fun with it. I wasn't concerned with how ridiculous the idea was at the moment, which is why I put things down like the police zapper, a potential new anti-riot vehicle? It probably would have been a good idea to produce another 2-3 more sheets like this, just dumping anything my brain was thinking out on paper, any number of great ideas could be hiding in there! After a few hours I did have a few things there were grabbing my attention, so I pushed forward with them and made more refined sketches of them.

Refined sketches

Wheelie Bin to Aircraft

My mind was made up after doing these sketches, the monolithic, almost foreboding shape of the aircraft on the right had captivated me. I wish I had shown more love to the other designs too though, I think the middle 2 especially could have been really interesting with a little bit more design thought behind them, the irony of a wheelie bin being used for a street cleaner vehicle design was also pretty awesome! 

The tiny, middle doodle had sealed the idea for me

Try & Try Again

This is where everything for me took a wrong turn. I started to work out the design of the ship and how it all would operate but I simply didn't do enough of it, the deadline for the final was looming and I knew how slow I was at digital painting so maybe that's why I rushed through this stage. On another note I found it odd how a simple doodle can really make an impact, on the upper page, the right, center doodle was all it took for me to know that the thing I was designing was actually cool looking, which is why that pose has been repeated for other drawings. Overall though at this stage, I knew the aircraft design was missing something.

Aircraft Final: Version 1

That missing feeling carried over to the final and despite having help with the digital painting I was still lost. Looking back I can clearly see what went wrong, for starters where are my thumbs for this? I should have done a few dozen quick thumbnails to get a feeling for the piece, make sure everything was were I wanted it to be, instead of realizing mistakes half way in. This was a massive lesson for me and I wasn't going to end this with me being unhappy with it.

Everything was handed in on time, but I had to redo this piece for my own sanity, I knew I could do better. I hit the internet for inspiration and help, not just with the painting but for the design of the craft too. This should have been done from the start so that's another lesson learnt! I had redesigned the aircraft to my liking and had also produced a few quick sketches to get an idea for the final composition, I simply enlarged my favourite one and worked straight from that.

Aircraft Drone Final: Version 2

When the good examples from that week were shown, the focus was not on the fanciest of visual or finals but mostly how well the vehicle was explained and presented. I know I can figure out how things work pretty well and I can also present my work to a high standard so that's exactly what I did this time around. The final visual I think is also a massive improvement over the previous one.

Now Build It

The next Visual Design class after the Workshops gave us the task to build our design out of what ever we wanted. I wanted at first to do card with paper mache but I found some card with really good thickness, probably too good as it was a pain to fold how I wanted so I dropped the paper mache idea.

I spent an hour trying to figure out how to create a decent net, because I wanted my model to be fairly accurate with some interesting details. My paper was beginning to wear thin from all the rubbing out... then it struck me to use 3DS Max to make the net.

Final net of the body

Making the net in Max worked well, I forgot to take into account the folding thickness of the card so when it came to sticking it all together some places were off but for the overall complexity of the model it worked wonders. I even managed to add in a few moving parts, using a few split pins. I'll post a few development and final shots at the end of this post. 

The Visual Design Intensive week really showed me how hard concepting can be, but also how rewarding it can be too. I was really surprised how much I learned over that week. Additionally it showed me how much extra work I need to do to even have a chance at being employed in the industry, not with just my drawing skills but with my design process too, thankfully I've still got a few more years to improve both aspects!

I kept everything open until the end to make sure I had easy access if I needed it

The side thrusters attached with split pins

Most of the extra parts cut out and glued, just need to attach them

The back wings added a lot of weight, making it tip over. You can just about see the stack of pennies I added to the front for balance

Vans & Streets.

A little 3D update now, with some information on what I have been doing over the past couple of weeks. After the Christmas break we were given the project to create a Transit Van in Max, this would be our first vehicle and I was looking forward to having a go at it.

During this period we were also given 2 weeks of intensive workshops for both Visual Design and 3D, I'll be posting up the work from the Visual Design when I've worked on it a little bit more so for now I'll just show what I did during the 3D week. The entire week was a sort of recap/catch up and I learnt a lot from it, the stuff I picked up should also improve my future 3D models. The final outcome of the week was a street scene.

Total Tris: 2,581

I got to retry making a telephone box, but this time with an interior plus many other things. I found creating the small details in the rubbish very rewarding, and seeing it all pieced together is worth some of the stress of 3DS Max. I did add my tree and building into the final scene too.

My Transit Van has a few mistakes that I've seen thanks to the workshop, like my polygon flow, there are sections of the Van that are really messy. I tried to fix it as best I could with what resources I had left but I had already spent too much time on it to simply scrap it and start again. I felt this was definitely a lesson learned and move on situation, along with a few other things. Despite this I do like my final van, it looks like a Transit and I think I have captured some nice details within the 5,000 tri budget.

Below I've added the transit into the street scene and also added the 3D viewer so you can explore both!

Van & Street Scene from Braden May on Sketchfab.

Quick Contour Drawings of Leicester.

The assignment after Christmas was to practice our contour drawings, using the city of Leicester. The length of this project was altered slightly to last 2 weeks, instead of the usual 1, this meant it was larger than other tasks. We had to do 12 finals with 12 thumbs each, that's a lot of drawing, luckily these had to be all fairly quick, trying to replicate various war artists using only pens and magic markers or ink washes.

Over the 2 weeks I explored Leicester, sitting in some odd places, fighting the wind and cold and also meeting many of the locals, who were all very accommodating considering I was more than likely just in the way. I even had one person offer me money, they were either very generous or that means I look homeless... fantastic. I had to decline the money.

I've put the drawings in the order that I did more or less, because I think you can see some progress as I get use to the techniques. I have noticed that the perspective is off in some of the finals and that a couple of the thumbs are better than their finals but I think I've managed to capture Leicester quite well in some of these!

Leicester Town Hall Park

Leicester Market

Leicester Bus Station

Leicester Cityscape, looking East

Leicester Highstreet

Along the River Soar

Leicester Cathedral

Welford Road

New Walk Museum & Art Gallery

Highcross Shopping Center

Dirt car park on Walnut Street 

Underground car park

The Merciless King.

Phwoar! What a post title, eh? I'll get to the meaning of this posts title further down but first I thought I'd use this space to show off other work too, it'll be the usual mix of life drawing, visual design and a little bit of 3D.

Life Drawing

Over the Christmas Holiday we were given a bit of homework to study feet, I can see why because they are difficult to draw and hold a lot of importance for figure drawing. Before I got into drawing my own feet I done a few studies using work from other artists who specialize in drawing the human figure; George B. Bridgman breaks down the figure into manageable, blocky forms, while John H. Vanderpoel builds upon this for a more finished looking piece.

George B. Bridgman studies

John H. Vanderpoel studies

My own

And here are a few pieces from the first life drawing class of 2014, the first one clearly showed I was a little bit out of practice. I really want to push away from my overly square forms, I use it as a quick method to rough things out yet I don't think I ever refine my work enough to lose the initial squareness, this is something I hope to change and I tried to push myself in this lesson to refine a bit more.

10 Min Pose: Christmas + Monday morning hits hard

10 Min Pose: Warming up

10 Min Pose: I like this one apart from the over sized calf 

A1 Size, 30 Min Pose: A challenging angle

Visual Design

I forgot to upload the still-life drawings I did for one of the weeks, so they've been thrown in here. Over the break I also managed to redo the Pumping Station final that I was not happy with, the second attempt went much better I think and I'm pleased with the results!

Still Life final

Pumping Station final V2

3D

Trees! 2 of them in fact. It was enjoyable making an object from nature, the randomness of it was a good contrast to the bin and building. For the creation of the leaves I followed a tutorial where the branches are created in Max, then exported out into Photoshop where you layer everything up and generally make it look fancy then you bring it back in Max as an alpha. The only problem that I still haven't figured out is why in Max my trees look all good and bushy but when they're rendered they look bare and dying.

Both trees are under 1000 tris

Why do they look so naked compared to the top screenshot?

The Merciless King
At last, the exciting bit! To keep us in shape over the Christmas holiday we were given a fun project to do, we had to create our own evil character, it could be Christmas themed but I chose not to do that. This was an open project so I spent a few days just thinking of ideas really, demons, Nazis, zombies, ghouls, you name it but none of these were really ticking my evil box. I decided I wanted to an evil king or lord, someone who doesn't necessarily look evil but their personality is corrupted, look at Joffrey in Game of Thrones, from first glance he looks quite normal but that guy is just a bastard.

With an idea in mind I collected reference and inspiration. Frank Frazetta has been an huge inspiration for me and I thought the way he can make a semi-nude guy explode off the page and have personality with nothing but lighting would be a great thing to try and replicate for my final piece.

Reference Sheet 1

Reference Sheet 2

Once I had a good pile of reference I began to sketch out quick thumbs, mainly to try and find an interesting composition for the sort of story I wanted to tell but to also make sure I had exhausted every possible route. While doing these I went a bit overboard and started to think up the backstory for this guy, sure it was a lot of wasted brain power but I needed to figure what was making my character evil, this definitely helped make the character more believable for me. Once the thumbs were done I done 3 more to flesh out some of the details.

Looking back I wish I had produced a few more larger thumbs to help with my composition and then maybe refined some more to really make sure I wasn't missing any potential favourites. In the end I went with the far left drawing. I hope by having him give a death stare to the viewer and also be walking towards them will add a sense of terror to help push the "evil" of the image.

The Merciless King

I used the moon to create some heavy contrast around his head as I wanted the viewer to be pulled to his face instantly. The burning city in the back ground is there to help show that something bad is happening but I think leaving it as a simple silhouette was a mistake, plus my smoke looks crappy. I was also struggling with what to do with his right hand, which is why it looks stuck in karate chopping action mode. I should have added in a few clouds too to break up the now bleak looking sky. Despite all the small mistake I am noticing I'm still happy with the drawing, I don't think I've ever created a piece from my imagination to this level and hopefully I can learn from these mistakes to make my next drawing even better.